Underground Exiles

That’s me to the left, and I thought I’d bring y’all up to date on the latest reading material that I’m perusing.

I was told a good number of years ago by the late, great Rev. Leon Nicholson to feed myself a steady diet of dead men’s brains.  What my wonderful, now deceased pastor was trying to impart to me was really quite simple: if a book has lasted for over 200 years, it stands to reason that it has something to say worth reading.

This advice from my pastor lead to me trying to read as much as I could from dead thinkers.  My first great love was with the works of Charles Spurgeon.  I found his sermons to be phenomenal, and when I was 13, Pastor Leon gave me a copy of Spurgeon’s Lectures To My Students.  I don’t think I actually read it all until I was 23.

Then…oh, then I discovered the Puritans.  The Puritans were men that thought deeply, loved Christ greatly, and suffered well.  All of which are goals of my own.

So right now I’m reading:

• An Humble Attempt To Promote Explicit Agreement And Visible Union Of God’s People In Extraordinary Prayer For the Revival of Religion And The Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom On Earth, by Jonathan Edwards
• The Mortification of Sin, by John Owen

as well as

• The Doctrine of Repentance, by Thomas Watson.

So, I’m hoping to blog my way through at least one, if not two, of these books.  I rarely write anything about my personal life, so maybe this will give you a bit of a window into my head.

The Prophet Zechariah

This is what the LORD Almighty says: “Many peoples and the inhabitants of many cities will yet come, and the inhabitants of one city will go to another and say, ‘Let us go at once to entreat the LORD and seek the LORD Almighty. I myself am going.’  And many peoples and powerful nations will come to Jerusalem to seek the LORD Almighty and to entreat him.” –Zechariah 8.20-22

In the book I’m reading by Jonathan Edwards, he takes his text from Zechariah 8.20-22, which he interprets as a prophecy of a future glorious advancement of God’s Church.  From what I’ve gathered so far, Edwards’ eschatology is decidedly postmillenial, which was fairly common for his era.

In his exegesis of the text, Edwards sees an account of how this future glorious advancement of God’s Church is to come about; he sees this happening as people gather in from different towns and countries and taking up a joint resolution and coming into visible agreement that they will seek God by united and extraordinary prayer, that he would manifest Himself to His Church and grant them the fruits of His presence.

Read more…

The Tombstone of the great Jonathan Edwards

Right now I’m reading the Complete Works of Jonathan Edwards, published by the Banner of Truth Trust in 2 volumes.

Volume 2 contains an interesting work of Rev. Edwards called An Humble Attempt To Promote Explicit Agreement And Visible Union Of God’s People In Extraordinary Prayer For the Revival of Religion And The Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom On Earth.  I just love titles from the eighteenth century; they certainly don’t leave you guessing on what the author intends to say.  I think the words of Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones are significant and bear reading on the subject of Jonathan Edwards:

“In my early days in the ministry there were no books which helped me more, both personally and in respect of my preaching, than this two-volume edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards…I devoured these volumes and literally just read and read them. It is certainly true that they helped me more than anything else. If I had the power I would make these two volumes compulsory reading for all ministers! Edwards seems to satisfy all round; he really was an amazing man.”

So for the next posts on undergroundexiles.com, I’m going to blog my way through Edward’s call to extraordinary prayer and post my thoughts as I read this amazing work.

“A minister may fill his pews, his communion roll, the mouths of the public, but what that minister is on his knees in secret before God Almighty, that he is and no more.” - John Owen, D.D.

This quote is one of many from John Owen, who is generally regarded as perhaps the greatest English speaking theologian ever. As a pastor and theologian, Owen was a man intimately acquainted with controversy, and wasn’t shy about meeting it head on. His style of writing is, frankly, hard to read, as it is ponderous and quite weighty, but slogging through it is well worth the effort.

Owen is perhaps best known for his works on sin in the life of the believer, as well as his Brief Declaration and Vindication Of The Doctrine Of The Trinity. It’s his work on the believer and indwelling sin, however that have moved me the most profoundly.

“The custom of sinning takes away the sense of it, the course of the world takes away the shame of it.” - John Owen, D.D.

Owen was a man that wrote prolifically on the believer’s need to put sin to death, and his works on personal holiness are some of the most practical and sound that I’ve ever read. If I can recommend one great Puritan to you, it would be John Owen.